


Fountain of Youth

by Luddleston



Category: Hades (Video Game 2018)
Genre: Age Regression/De-Aging, Crack Treated Somewhat Seriously, Established Relationship, Fluff and Smut, Frottage, Hand Jobs, M/M, a lot of TSOA feelings sneaking in, post-reunion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-26
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-17 18:46:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29721591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luddleston/pseuds/Luddleston
Summary: Shades can change their appearance in Elysium, including their age, at will. Achilles has not been informed that it's possible to do thison accident.Or: Achilles and Patroclus revert to their much younger selves and re-live their first time.
Relationships: Achilles/Patroclus (Hades Video Game)
Comments: 18
Kudos: 174





	Fountain of Youth

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to the cousins for this wonderful idea and for my roomie for brainstorming dialogue with me! 
> 
> btw, not entirely connected to their first time in TSOA because I couldn't be bothered to go find the book and reread that part. 
> 
> Also HI this is the first time I've written these 2 WITHOUT A ZAG UP IN THERE. I'm about to do that again, but like. professionally. zine-professionally.

One of the greatest blessings the underworld had gifted them with, Patroclus decided, was time to relax. Constant warfare didn’t allow for much lounging about, enjoying one another’s company, and so he greatly appreciated the quiet mornings-or-evenings he got to spend taking an extraordinary long amount of time to get out of bed. Or, not getting out of bed at all.

Achilles was a vision like this, his golden edges outlined in the pseudo-sunlight that shone through their windows. At first, Patroclus thought he was asleep, but Achilles reached for him the instant Patroclus settled back into bed. 

“Where did you go?” Achilles must have known it hadn’t been far, because Patroclus had not bothered with dressing and was not in the habit of going about completely nude. 

“I thought you were going to sleep in longer,” he said, gesturing to the book in his hand, which had been a gift from Zagreus, who was apparently an avid reader when he wasn’t running about the underworld wreaking havoc. “Surprisingly enough, looking at your face and wondering how anybody let you be this beautiful does get tiresome after a while.” This was a lie, and Achilles knew it. 

He played along, still. “Now that I am awake, you can do much more than look at my face and wonder.” 

Patroclus needed no more encouragement. 

While they may have been long-dead, their bodies certainly felt alive, Achilles’ lazy, early-morning kisses just as warm as they were on the rare occasions he got to have them in life. The only difference was the atmosphere—naturally, Elysium did not have the issue of unbearable summer heat as soon as the sun went up, which Patroclus greatly appreciated. It wasn’t terrible, warm bodies sticking together with sweat and, depending on how long they had together, with other things. But he’d rather not deal with it. 

If there was anything more beautiful than watching Achilles at peace, it was watching him slowly work himself up, merely from a series of gentle touches. In life, his body had not been overly sensitive, a side effect of invulnerability (although Patroclus always could find the places that still made him jump and squirm). With his death, the invulnerability had worn away, and now, Patroclus could make him shiver by just passing his hands over his body. 

The physicalities of shades were strange in that they had much to do with emotion and little to do with flesh and blood. When Patroclus had first been reunited with Achilles, his lover appeared years older than he’d been when he died. As they spent more time together, Achilles looked more like the man he’d known. He wondered if the same had happened to himself, but he hadn't been in the habit of looking at his reflection. 

Despite knowing how such things could change, nothing would have prepared him for what occurred when Achilles admitted, “the way you turn me on, like this—it makes me feel like I’m seventeen again, like the first time you laid your hands on me.”

His voice was the first thing Patroclus noticed a change in. Higher, sweeter, the sort of tone Patroclus remembered from when Achilles used to sing often. There was no change to the feel of his skin beneath Patroclus’ palm, because Achilles never scarred, no parts of him ever became rough, but he could feel that the man beneath him was no longer quite as broad or as muscular. 

And when he pulled away, looking curiously at Achilles’ face, it became clear that his words had done something to his body. 

“What?” 

“You… don’t just feel like you’re seventeen again,” Patroclus said. “You look it. Somewhere around there, at least. Perhaps a bit older?”

“Do I?” He reached up, found that his hair fell only to about his shoulders. “Oh! Of all the—“ He sat up, whirling around for the little hand mirror in the side table drawer. 

This certainly was a younger Achilles, in both action and looks. He slammed the drawer a little too hard, rattling whatever else was in there, having not grown accustomed to his own godly strength. He’d been gentle when he needed to be, back then, but when startled or angry, he couldn’t hold himself back. 

He cursed as he observed his own reflection, tilting the mirror this way and that, as if from a different angle he would look his proper age. Patroclus had nearly forgotten how pretty he had been, delicately-featured as a girl (which had been to his advantage at the start of the war). 

“How do you suppose I get back to my usual appearance?” he asked, finally setting the mirror down.

“I have no idea,” Patroclus said. “You turned this way because you said I made you feel young.” 

“Perhaps,” and here, Achilles inclined himself toward Patroclus, reaching out for him. He was not fully done growing, and was shorter than Patroclus, now. “I need you to make me feel something else, then.” 

“I’m not touching you like this.”

“Pat! It’s not as if I’m a child,” Achilles laughed. “And it’s not as if a man your age taking a man my age would be uncommon, anyhow.” 

“It isn’t that,” he argued, having never been quite bothered by propriety in that way, “simply that I am so used to being close in age with you.” 

“Well, then.” Achilles tossed his head in a haughty way that Patroclus deeply associated with him as a younger man. “Clearly, the solution is to get you to turn yourself… whatever age I am now.”

“Absolutely not.”

“And why not?” There it was, the timbre of his voice that meant he was about to convince Patroclus to do something stupid. “Are you entirely uninterested in reliving our first time?”

“What I’m uninterested in,” Patroclus corrected him, “is being plunged headfirst back into my awkward phase. You wouldn’t know, you never had one.” 

“Oh, come on. I did, I was just a bit younger. I didn’t sing for months.” He was referring to when his voice cracked all the time before it deepened, which was by no means enough to constitute an ‘awkward phase.’

“You might have forgotten, I did not have all this—“ he gestured to himself, referring to all the muscle he had put on once he was done growing, “—when I was seventeen. Do you want to see me all gangly and entirely composed of limbs, before my beard would grow in right?” 

Achilles pouted, an action he usually avoided making as an older man. “You were cute,” he said. 

“You had nobody else to compare me with.” He was referring to when they first came together, while Achilles and he trained with Chiron, and there was nobody else on the peak to draw Achilles’ attention. “Besides, I have no desire to return to the time when I could be aroused by a stiff breeze and brought off if you kissed me long enough.” 

“Are you listening to yourself at all?”

“Yes.” He tried desperately not to think about how good it had all felt when they first began experimenting—lingering kisses, each longer than the last, hands exploring one another for the first time—gods had it been unreal. 

“You’re thinking about it.” There was that sing-song, teasing voice, the one that cajoled him into so many misadventures. Achilles was thinking about it too. His cock was stiffening without a single touch. Patroclus pretended not to notice. 

“And what if I am?” 

Achilles leaned closer, hands looped around his neck, close enough that the tip of his nose brushed Patroclus’. His eyes, sea-colored and bright with mischief, said more than his lips ever needed to. Patroclus was helpless to do anything but what Achilles desired of him. 

“I’ll take you like this, then, if you want,” he agreed, perhaps a bit too late, as the sound of his own voice betrayed the fact that his body had shrunk to fit Achilles’. 

Oh, hell.

Achilles laughed again, bright and beautiful. “There you are,” he said. “Gods, it’s been so long since I’ve seen you clean-shaven.” 

He couldn’t help but grimace. “If we’re stuck like this, I’m blaming you.” 

“You’ll have all the right to,” Achilles agreed. “For now, though: kiss me. Like it’s our first.” 

Their first had actually been when they were even younger than this, stolen by Patroclus in a moment when Achilles was so beautiful, he was too weak to do anything but. Patroclus kissed him like that, again. Brief, a kiss snatched from his mouth in an instant. 

He leaned away after, and this time, Achilles chased him. 

Achilles swung himself into Patroclus’ lap with careless ease, and Patroclus, who was either unused to this form or reverting to the clumsiness his growth spurts had given him, tumbled over and nearly smashed his head into the bed frame. Achilles, still mirthful, kissed him again. 

It was nothing like their first. 

It was not even very much like the first time Achilles had kissed him with the intent to go further. This was an Achilles who, despite the body he currently wore, had kissed Patroclus hundreds of times and knew the feel of it. And who, equally so, knew how to give Patroclus what he liked. 

Of course, he knew just as well how to give Achilles his pleasure, and this combination of things meant that the two of them became overwhelmed even more quickly than they had when they were actually adolescents. With no need to undress, there was nothing for them but to clutch at one another gracelessly, pressing together until it was all too much. They reached a point at which their bodies would no longer cooperate with what their minds knew, and all the fumbling and senseless grinding Patroclus remembered of their youth was back in full. 

“I forgot. How. _Good_ this felt.” Achilles punctuated each thought with a thrust of his hips, rubbing his cock against Patroclus’ and making him gasp and arch into it. 

“It always feels this good, with you.”

“That’s sweet.” Achilles bent to kiss his jaw, his lips against bare skin, and that was perhaps the strangest change of all. “But I do think usually—ah—the both of us require a bit more, um. Stimulation.” 

“I will… I will give you that.” He was already so close, it was almost unbearable to slow down, but he pulled Achilles into another kiss, holding him as still as he could. It had been years since they'd first done this, but he trembled all the same.

He was used to the way it felt to sink his hand into Achilles' hair, gold slipping between his fingers, and he was used to the way it felt to roll his hips up against Achilles', starting smooth but then jerky and stuttering. He was not, however, used to Achilles making _that noise_ these days. Their time together during the war, followed by their parting from one another for who-knows-how-long had made both of them a bit quieter during the act, Achilles now more prone to whisper something sweet in his soft, deep voice. 

Patroclus broke the kiss fully, so that he could hear the next cry from Achilles' lips unimpeded. Even all these years later, Patroclus could connect that sound to the first time he'd heard it: the first time he made Achilles come. This time, he wasn't quite there yet, but he was damn close. 

Achilles hid his face in Patroclus' neck, close enough that Patroclus had to reach up to brush his hair out of the way so it wouldn't end up in his mouth next he spoke. "You sound gorgeous like this. Like you're going to come for me." 

Achilles could no longer abide by the pace Patroclus had sent, and he thrust insistently against him, either not willing or not able to pull away enough to get a hand between the two of them. "I am. I will. _Oh,_ I love you." He hissed a breath in between his teeth and then made a noise that sounded as if it could have become a sob. "I never said that, the first time." 

"Both of us ought to have— _Achilles."_

"Tell me now," Achilles said. "Tell me, so that I can hear it in the way you would have said it back then." 

_"I love you."_

Another of those high, breathless cries—this time, Achilles _was_ coming, and Patroclus found himself startled by the feeling of it spilling over his hip, his body not yet used to it. 

Achilles reached for his cock, stroking him with confident ease, because he'd always been good at this. "I should have told you how I loved you," he said, still breathless. "I should have told you how much I wished we could stay that way forever. How I knew, then, that you were everything to me. That I could never live without you." 

His words brought Patroclus closer than his hand did. 

"Kiss me," Patroclus begged him, though he could hardly kiss him back. 

Alive or dead, in whatever form of being he may have existed in, some things would always feel incredible. For one: breathing the same air as Achilles while he was brought deliriously to the edge of orgasm and then dropped over it. For another: the way Achilles stroked him all the way through, and after, until Patroclus became too sensitive to do anything but whine at him. And for a third: Achilles holding him tight after, his weight on top of Patroclus tethering him to the earth. 

Achilles kissed him deep after, drawing Patroclus into a lazy tangle that blurred all his thoughts. 

Eventually, though, he worked his mind into functioning. 

"We still look like this," he observed. 

"Mm. Best try another round, I'd say." 

Patroclus was quite certain nothing would come of trying the same thing and expecting a different result. However, Achilles was quite persuasive, and also close to becoming hard again. 

"If we must," he said, his mock irritation falling flat and coming out as pure eagerness instead. 

Achilles laughed, the wild cackle of his youth, and pulled him in again.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on twitter @luddlestons or on my new NSFW twitter @luddlesmut for more of these dudes


End file.
